At his State of the Union address nearly two months ago, President Obama announced plans for the Brain Activity Map (BAM) project (see The Nerve blog Part 1 and Part 2), a billion-dollar ten-year research initiative to gain a better understanding of the brain and to provide deeper insights into diseases like Alzheimer Disease, Parkinson Disease, and Autism Spectrum Disorder.

On Tuesday, April 2nd, the President announced that he plans to include the BAM project – now termed the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative – in his 2014 budget proposal. The director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, notes that one of the major goals of the project is to simultaneously sample from many neurons in real-time. Although existing technology can measure the activities of single neurons and of brain regions, it cannot measure those of circuits. Because existing technology has not yet advanced to a level that allows such complex analysis, the BRAIN initiative will be initially funded $100 million for the year of 2014 to develop and advance neuroscience technologies. Yearly negotiations will take place to determine future funding.

Over the next several months, 14 leading neuroscientists from Stanford, CIT, Harvard, Brown, Princeton, and Brandeis will serve on the advisory board (also called the “dream team” or the “brain trust”) to refine the project’s immediate and long-term goals. They will need to decide which research areas are of high priority, which projects require more funding, and which technologies need to be developed and employed. Additionally, President Obama has required a study to explore the ethical, societal, and legal problems associated with the project’s advances in neuroscience.

Dr. Francis Collins and President Obama on Tuesday, April 4th at the White House

Although $100 million may not be sufficient to transform neuroscience, it may “help get this project off the ground,” as President Obama says, and forge a new path for advancing neuroscience. In fact, Francis Collins notes that the Human Genome project was only funded $28 million for its first year. Further, private organizations including the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Kavli Foundation have already committed $158 million.

Just as genetics research had been underway before the Human Genome Project, neuroscience research has been going on long before the announcement of the BAM project or the BRAIN initiative. Hopefully, this investment in neuroscience research will do for neuroscience the same that the Human Genome Project did for genetics: provide a plan considering the state of current research, speed up the process of improving the state of knowledge, bring more money into the economy than funded, recruit additional experts to foster an interdisciplinary effort, and capture the interest of the general public. The BRAIN Initiative should provide a goal-oriented long-term focus and allow the coordination and collaboration of neuroscientists in advancing biology, health, medicine, and society.

“Of course, none of this will be easy. If it was, we would already know everything there was about how the brain works, and presumably my life would be simpler here. It could explain all kinds of things that go on in Washington.” – President Obama

In light of the Obama Administration’s decision to commit $3 billion over 10 years to NIH’s Brain Activity Map project, we thought it may be important to go back to our roots.

Who are we? This is the ultimate question posed by all of Western thinking and perhaps NIH’s Brain Activity Map is the culmination of our efforts. The goal of the project, in a nutshell, is “mapping the activity of every neuron in the human brain in 10 years.” Absurd, outrageous, momentous, profound! Okay, so when did we decide that this was possible, or even that we should try? In their modern form, these beliefs spring from a movement in cognitive science called Connectionism.

We have cycled through hundreds of psychological and philosophical ideologies throughout the course of Western society. One school of thought that still ubiquitously drives research projects today is the part of cognitive science called Connectionism. The central goal of Connectionism is “to explain human intellectual abilities using artificial neural networks.”

Via: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/connectionism/

The basics look something like this: Input Units, generally representative of some sensory neurons, feed into “invisible” Hidden Units which are organized in some structured way and subsequently release their signals onto Output Units, which presumably carry out some intellectual function. The brain can then be broken down into hundreds, thousands of networks like this that have a specific role in our intellectual ability. At each level, every “neuron” sums together all of the signals it receives and performs some processing specific to itself, its specific “activation function”. After the processing, the activation function decides to either fire or not, 1 or 0, yes or no. If the firing threshold of the activation function is reached, then the “neuron” will send a signal to all of its downstream partners. This is the central pillar of Connectionism.

Whether you’ve read an article, listened to the radio, watched the news, or heard from a friend, I’m sure you already know that President Obama and his administration have been planning to enrich our future as mind and brain enthusiasts. However, if you have been under a rock, studying for midterms, or working (way too much), you may be asking – how? Well, do you know the whole Human Genome Project thing? How it revolutionized genetics? Just like geneticists who were able to map the complete human genome by 2003, neuroscientists will be given the goal of more fully understanding the human brain by building a map of its activity.

Therefore, with a decade-long, billion-dollar Brain Activity Map (BAM, hence O-BAM-A) project, the Obama administration will likely indirectly result in ten years of high dopamine levels throughout the neuroscience community (awaiting results on statistical significance). Scientists hope that the BAM project will be included in the president’s next budget proposal, with up to $3 billion in funding over the proposed ten years. Further, they expect that the project will – as many journalists, bloggers, and the like have been saying – do for neuroscience what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.

Initial view of categories on the data portal gene search at the Allen Institute for human brain microarray data

According to the age old saying, “With great brainpower comes great BAM prosperity.” But where will this brainpower be coming from? Apparently, federal agencies as well as private foundations and teams of nanoscientists and neuroscientists plan to put their brains together to ensure that the project will be carried out successfully. Included in the project are the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Before I go into more detail, I just want to clarify that the BAM project is distinct from the static brain study by NIH (mentioned in the New York Times article, Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain) and also from the Brain Atlas project by the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

One major goal of the BAM project is to not only develop the technology necessary to study diseases and discover new and improved therapies for mental illnesses, but also to advance artificial intelligence. However, a big problem with studying the brain is doing so non-invasively. In an article from Neuron, “The Brain Activity Map Project and the Challenge of Functional Connectomics,” Yuste et al. suggest several approaches to solve this problem. For example, synthetic DNA could be used to measure and store brain activity on molecule-size sensors. To find out more about connectionism, check out our blog this Friday!

You may be wondering – why is the government pushing for this project? Other than possibly helping to save their own family and friends, this project could create jobs, capture the interest of the general public, enhance the reputation of the United States as a leader in science, and even boost the economy. The project could stabilize the careers of current neuroscientists and create opportunities for aspiring students. But how will the money be spent? Some scientists are concerned about needing to consider ethical problems more intensely while still others doubt the project could reach completion in ten years, or in infinitely many years. Studying simpler organisms first, for example to ensure newly developed technologies work, may be required. Nevertheless, many are hopeful, seeing this project as a stepping stone to fully understanding neuroscience and to demonstrating the importance of such research to our future.

So, what are the numbers? Considering the Human Genome project again, which cost around $3.8 billion, the government ran a study only to find that by 2010 nearly $800 billion had been pouring into the economy over the ten years since its inception in 1990. The government, then, expects this project to help boost the economy as well.

On January 17th, at a meeting at the California Institute of Technology, three government agencies, neuroscientists, nanoscientists, and representatives from Microsoft, Google, and Qualcomm decided that there will be enough computing power to support the project. Additionally, they suggested the creation of “national brain observatories.” I suppose we will have to wait until March to find out more about these observatories as well as more scientific and financial details.

So, for now, mind and brain people, get thinking, learning, and working, and, as President Obama said in his State of the Union address, let’s “invest in the best ideas!”